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October 27, 2006
Shift Two, Start!
I have two working shifts. One starts when I actually go to work during the day, my W+K hours. The second starts now, when I come home, and do things like write this entry (very rare), or, as is more likely the case these days, work on Riow Arai’s music video for the track Death Breaks on his forthcoming album, Survival Seven.
I’ll come back to that later. John Jay is in town now with some journalists (writer Brian Libby and photographers Michael Rubenstein and Kosuke Okahara) and he gave a presentation to them about TokyoLab. In fact, they are probably just finishing with Takagi Masakatu’s live show which started around 7pm today. Hearing John Jay speak this time, it really hit me that yappari he does have the exact job that Digiki wants to do (or sort of does do on a really DIY level without getting paid). And what that entails is basically overseeing a huge range of creative activities across all media and almost all nations, and networking with a vast group of creators in varying fields (Graphic, Advertising, Music, Architecture, Product Design, Illustration, Photo, Fashion–hey I just listed like every Art Center major), as well as with media people writing for influential publications.
He goes on to show all the work produced by the Lab, talking about it in a larger social context, and as a uniquely Japanese (Tokyo) form of expression that could and does not exist in the same form in any of our other offices. I agree with everything he says, and he says it with such simplicity and impact. What can I say, people talk, we play a selection of our video works off the DVD player, they get a hands-on with all of our products. Everyone surely goes home impressed... This is how media is made.
It seems so simple, but to get to this stage a huge amount of work has been done in advance. Three years of creating this particular body of commercial work, and more time before on Nike projects in the late 90’s experimenting with pairing visual artists and musicians to create expressions that become advertisements––a prototype for what the Lab has become (minus the advertisement, other than being PR for Wieden+Kennedy itself). Multiples of expression across a broad media range have been utilized, there is an interplay of art, music, strategy, events, marketing, etc. that will inevitably have touched people at a multitude of disparate points in a wide variety of ways. I never really anticipated participating in this kind of project as someone studying graphic design, which seems as finite a term as ever.
Recently, in New York, after Hifana’s performance for Theme magazine, we were all taken to dinner afterwards by Jiae Kim and John Lee, its founders (and also a married couple). There was something really simple that Jiae said which I found quite apt, and that was that, as a graphic designer (she studied graphic design and creative directs the magazine) you are not really contibuting to culture. That’s why she wanted to start Theme. I guess that is to say, a magazine is something that does contribute to culture. Well, much more so than sitting behind a desk and making logos. Graphic Design is a part of a magazine, or any modern form of communication, but it’s just that––a part. All the kids out there in typography classes at this moment have a long way to go to arrive at a truly nuanced understanding of this notion.
Am I saying that new pop objects of the current century must be attractive and well-executed across all media; some kind of big conglomerate expression that reaches me no matter what I do or where I go? This is obviously not the case. Historically (and even recently) I have been highly enthralled by many things that were probably being enjoyed by only 50 other people in the world, that lived in only one medium, and weren’t bombarding my mental space constantly. This is what sublime advertising should do, shouldn’t it? It just needs to hit you once, and make an emotional impact in that single moment. Easier said than done of course.
As pop as I can be in a sense, in a much truer sense I am probably strange and perverse. That is why it seems very natural to do a video for Riow Arai, an artist who is never going to go mainstream, no matter how fucking awesome much of his output is. Not in this lifetime will it gain much momentum past the relatively small crowd of maniacs that already know about it; even in an imagined scenario such as the good folks like us at W+K picking it up and pushing it––the packaging, the videos, the media placement––it is simply not going to be adopted large-scale because it’s not that kind of expression. I completely accept that this is the case with the large majority of media that I enjoy partaking in the consumption of.
At this point in my life I find myself in the awkward position of having a foot in two worlds that might naturally be thought of as irreconcilable, and it is a strange and yet often delightful mindspace to be in. Vast and miniute. Under and overground. How they are similar or different, and why. I guess I’d wager to say from where I stand, they simply aren’t. Perhaps especially in Tokyo, where pop can be perverse, the under is overground and vice-versa, there’s no real point thinking about it––as long as one has a strong sense of what they like.
Posted by shane at October 27, 2006 10:05 PM